Early return

Today was the original date for camper-return. Instead, the camper went back four days ago and we slipped into our flat in Neuss a few days early. We are not camper people.

We had grand plans for our 22-days touring around Europe: western Germany, Luxembourg, eastern and southern France, Monaco, northern Italy, Andorra, Spain, and maybe even Portugal. The difficulties driving the camper, problems finding campsites that met our needs, and the challenges of getting into cities to see their sights humbled our ambitions – and necessitated changing our tactics.

Instead of hopping from place to place, discovering a new area daily, we stayed at campsites we liked for a couple nights and left the camper parked for a day or two at a time to explore. We stayed in rural Luxembourg and used their nation-wide public transit system to get to the capital (unoriginally also named Luxembourg). We camped outside of Saint-Tropez and wandered Mediterranean beaches. We stayed on two different vineyards and sampled French wines with the winemakers. We saw Mont St. Michel, the Bayeux Tapestry, and Juno Beach. We gawked at Notre Dame in Chartres and a few other churches.

What we didn’t do was go into larger cities or travel nearly as far as we thought we would. Plans to meet up with someone in Dijon were abandoned. A trip into Grenoble to visit a friend was pushed aside. Any hopes of gambling in Monaco were dashed. Andorra’s narrow streets and lack of major highways scared us away. The navigational and language barriers of Italy and Spain felt insurmountable. Portugal was just too damn far.

It was a radically different trip than anticipated.

We saw rural Germany, Luxembourg, and France in a way we could have never expected – partially because the GPS had no way of knowing how terrifying single-lane country roads are in a camper!

We also learnt about places we didn’t know existed and revelled in continually finding historic markers. We drove along the winding Mosel wine route and crossed the towering Île de Ré bridge. We visited war cemeteries and paid our respects to those who fell in the two world wars.

We communicated in rusty French (me) or broken German (my husband) because we had no other choice in the countryside. We bought a baguette nearly every day in France and consumed huge volumes of paté and cheese. We suffered through wind and rain storms at three separate campsites – including one overlooking the high waves of the Atlantic.

And parts of the trip made our dog pretty happy. Sofie got to swim in the Mediterranean, chase a ball on a beach in Normandy, drive long distances either sitting on my lap or curled up on her camper bed, sample French paté, and she spent a lot of time with us.

In the end, we accomplished my dream of getting somewhere warm in February, didn’t have any catastrophic fights, saw some amazing sights, ate some fantastic food, drove more than 5000 kilometres, and, perhaps most of all, solidified our status as non-campers.

Yoga teacher, writer, strategist, dog walker, reader, editor, web designer – I like to wear many hats (although not literally because of the resulting squished hair) and delight in knowing just enough about a lot of things.